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Madoff and the Mets

How the 'extremely wealthy' allowed the Madoff fraud to endure.

By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Updated Feb. 8, 2011 9:12 p.m. ET

To a certain kind of dyspeptic teenager, the Madoff-Mets saga will make perfect sense. Fred Wilpon, Saul Katz and siblings got their business empire, including the New York Mets, not through cleverness but luck. The cleverness was Bernie Madoff's. Their luck was to have been his patsies.

We say patsies. Irving Picard, the lawyer assigned to recover assets for Madoff's victims, calls them "willful" participants. The Wilpon-Katzes are accused of taking out $300 million in "fictitious profits," but the...